Adelina Angusheva-Tihanov (University of Manchester)
The medieval cultures of Southern and Eastern Slavs are often regarded as a result of a colossal process of translation and adaptation of Byzantine cultural and literary models. Indeed, Orthodox Slavic literatures owe to Byzantium not only their aesthetic principles and discursive practices, themes and imagery, textual patterns and genres, but also a large volume of texts translated from Greek, and circulated in various milieus from the Balkans to Northern Russia for more than seven centuries. Further, within this temporal and spatial frame, the translation techniques changed several times to reflect deeper transformations of the ideological and educational strategies in the Slavic cultures. And yet, as most recent studies show, medieval Slavic interpreters had been particularly selective while choosing texts for translation from the Byzantine literature. For example, almost no Greek epigram, satirical work or liturgical drama was translated in the South Slavic literatures; a relatively small number of the Byzantine works belonging to the genre of the theological discourse and doctrinal disputation appeared in Slavic translation.
My paper will focus on one important exception – the Slavic translation of the Emperor John’s VI Kantakouzenos treatises against Islam. Written in the second half of the fourteenth century – time of religious confrontations and political turmoil in the Balkans, the texts developed further the typical medieval form of inter-religious dogmatic disputation. The translation, done probably at Mount Athos in the 1390s, not only presents a genre less popular in the Slavic literatures, but also reflects vital and pressing questions for the fourteenth-century Balkan society and culture. Moreover, while the earlier Slavic manuscripts containing John’s Kantakouzenos dialogues show compilers’ interest in all the emperor’s polemic works and demonstrates the active Balkan monastic (Hesychastic) network; the later, sixteenth-century codices, copied after the establishment of the Ottoman empire on the peninsula, witness a growing attraction to the anti-Muslims’ texts only (cf. for instance Ms Gaster 2082, John Rylands Library, Manchester). Studying the techniques applied by the Slavic interpreter(s) and the specific rendition of the key dogmatic and theological terms, I will try to contextualize this translation within the corpus of theological texts known to the late fourteenthcentury Slavs.
Further, I will be looking closely at the cultural policies which provoked the appearance of this translation, as well as at the shifts in the cultural framework distributing the emperor’s translated works. Having in mind that the first-hand knowledge of Islamic theology was almost nonextant among the Balkan Slavs even in the 16th c., I will try to analyse the role of the translation in forming the perception of the Muslims and their faith in the late medieval Balkan Christian communities.